The Inferno
by Twilight L Xari
Summary: It took him a while to realize that he was dead.  But in the meantime, he got to tour Hell.  A/BB


Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note or Beyond Birthday. However, August Amias is as good as mine (and Dess's), since they never really expand on A very much.

A/N: Okay, I could've sworn I put this up on here ages ago, since I was so excited about it, but apparently not. Bad Twi. I actually wrote this for my AP Composition course, after we read Dante's _Inferno_. We had to make our own versions of Hell, and I decided to just plop A and B into mine, since they were perfect. Enjoy!

* * *

It was dark when I awoke. I knew I was somewhere, in this inky blackness, but I didn't know where. I couldn't remember how I had come to be in this darkness. Confused, I stood, looking around, though I could see nothing. "Hello?" I called tentatively, not sure whether or not to hope for a response.

"Hello," said a voice from the blackness.

I tried to pinpoint the sound, but it seemed to have come from all directions, or perhaps from no direction. Perhaps it was only in my mind. I couldn't tell. "Where am I?"

There was a small pause, as the voice seemed to consider its response. "Hell."

"What?" For some reason, I got the feeling that I may have been dead, although I couldn't remember dying. …Actually, I couldn't remember anything at all, though something about the voice seemed familiar. "Why? Who are you?"

"You are here to see what Fate wishes that you see," said the voice, which still seemed to be neither in the blackness nor anywhere else.

"What do you mean, what Fate - " I started, but I stopped myself. I had a feeling that I wouldn't get an answer, no matter how many times I asked. "Alright, so Fate wants me to see whatever this is." The afterlife, I supposed, or else some strange state of unconsciousness. "Are you Fate, then?"

"…Yes and no."

That wasn't much of an answer, but I once again suspected that I wouldn't get much more information, even if I asked again. "Is this what I'm supposed to see? Darkness?"

"Of course not. How silly of me." There was a small crackle, and a tiny flame sprung to life in the darkness. I followed the light to a pale, spidery hand, then to a dark sleeve, and finally up to a hooded face. "Is that better?"

I supposed I couldn't expect Fate to show its - his, actually; the voice was distinctly male - face. "Yes. But I still can't see very well."

"You will." The light moved, and Fate walked past me, wrapping long, thin fingers around my wrist as he did.

"Where are we going?" I asked, following him. As we walked, I began to see light returning, until we were standing in what looked like firelight.

The tiny flame in Fate's hand went out. He looked at me, and even though I couldn't see his face, I could feel his eyes on me. "Down."

It was like falling off a cliff, or would have been, had I ever fallen from a cliff. I might have, I supposed, and I wouldn't remember. It was free-fall, but without air, without movement, just the feeling of bottomlessness. Then, without warning, the ground was solid again, and the firelight I had seen before was real flame, leaping into the air all around us.

"What is all this?" I asked, looking around and fighting the urge to try to escape the flames. "Where are we?"

"The first plain of Hell," Fate said calmly. "Come." He walked forward, down what looked for all the world like a flaming hallway, and as he was still holding my wrist, I had no choice but to follow.

We hadn't gone far when I heard the screams. I stopped, as did Fate when he realized that I was no longer moving. I opened my mouth to ask who was screaming, and why, but he seemed to know what I would ask and cut me off before I could say a word.

"This is Hell. It isn't a happy place."

Of course. I still hadn't adjusted to the idea that I was in Hell, rather than…somewhere else.

A minute or so later, I could see an open field past the flames, populated by what looked like a huge crowd of people, all running to and fro across the dirt.

My hooded companion seemed immune to the screaming I could hear echoing from everywhere. "This is the Plain of Greed," he informed me dispassionately. "All the people you see never stopped wanting more than they had, and stopped at nothing to get it, no matter the cost to the world around them."

"…If you don't mind my two cents - " I started, but I stopped when a hulking brown shape rose out of the ground, seemingly made of dirt, and charged at one of the people in the middle of the field. He saw it and sprinted away, but he wasn't nearly fast enough, and he was tackled to the ground. Another _thing_ appeared close by and seized the fallen man's head, while the other took hold of his leg, and together they ripped him apart. More of the monsters appeared from the dirt, drawn to the body, but by then I wasn't looking. I felt sick.

"It's because of their lives," Fate said, again answering a question before I asked it, almost as though he knew me well enough to anticipate what I would say. "They stopped at nothing to get what they wanted in life, draining whatever resources they could from the people around them, and now they're doomed to be devoured by their own greed." He didn't seem to care that people were suffering, but seeing _human beings_ suffering like that made me shudder.

He seemed to understand what I felt, at least. "Come." He took my hand, rather than just grabbing my wrist, and somehow it felt familiar, though I wasn't sure how.

_Someone is holding my hand, tugging me down a hallway. "Come on, you're always studying, you need to get outside more!" I'm pulled out a door, and the world outside is so much brighter than the one indoors, the sunlight dazzling me. "Let's play soccer!"_

Heedless of any danger, Fate walked straight across the field, carving a path through the tormented souls there, not disturbed in the slightest by the violence around us. But I supposed that if you were a divine being, you would be used to that sort of thing.

Despite the goriness of the scene around us, I couldn't tear my eyes away. Most of the people were nameless to me, people I had never met or heard of. Once, though, I stopped, one of the faces trigging a memory from somewhere deep in my mind. There was a name there, just out of reach. "Is that…?"

It seemed to take Fate a moment to pick out exactly which figure I was talking about. "Nixon," he answered dispassionately.

Now I remembered. There had been some talk, at some point, about him dying. Someone - I couldn't remember who - had told me about Watergate, or perhaps I'd read it somewhere. The ideas were fuzzy, but I remembered them. He'd tried to sabotage the Democratic Party in a bid to be re-elected. I supposed that being so power-hungry was worthy of Hell, although I personally wouldn't have put him there.

We passed through the crowd unhindered, leaving them behind as we continued on. "Where are we going now?" I asked, feeling slightly braver now that the man-eating monsters were no longer a possible threat.

"Down again," he said simply, pulling me through a narrow gap in the flames. I heard something bubbling, roaring, and I looked around for the source of the noise. It proved to be just a few steps in front of me, where dirt and stone, liquefied by some unfathomable heat, was rushing over the edge of what appeared to be a cliff. My guide stepped right up to the edge, on what seemed to be the only patch of ground cool enough to walk on, dragging me with him, and looked down. I couldn't see anything but lava.

"How do we get down?" I asked timidly. I was afraid we would have to take some sort of raft. I didn't relish the idea of splashing into a pool of red-hot lava and being burned to death, if I wasn't dead already, which I was beginning to suspect that I might be.

There was a soft sound from under the hood, and it took me a moment to realize that Fate was laughing, quietly. "We'll be taking the safest way down," he assured me.

I felt a rush of air behind me. When I turned and looked, I found myself surrounded by inky feathers - Fate had wings.

"Sadly, these are only temporary." He reached out in a gesture that seemed familiar, if only I could place it, and wrapped his arms around me tightly.

_I am in a crushing embrace. My face is buried on someone's shoulder, and I'm crying. A voice is murmuring something in my ear, and a gentle hand is rubbing my back. "It's okay, August. You don't have to be perfect."_

"Hold on," Fate advised. I barely had time to put my arms around his neck before we were airborne, plunging over the edge of the molten cliff.

There was a feeling of falling this time, and when I looked down, I could make out an indistinct cluster of lines that almost reminded me of… "A maze?"

"Very good." He spread his wings to slow our descent. "You were always such a quick learner…"

Once we got closer, I could make out shapes between the walls of the maze, and the shapes solidified into people, and the people had faces, and then the black wings beat mightily and we touched down on solid ground. In front of us, a man was walking slowly, his hands outstretched. He must have heard us, because he turned to look at us, and what I saw made me flinch and want to back away, although the latter of those two was impossible with Fate's arms still around me. The man had no eyes, just empty, bloody sockets, as though something had clawed them out. His hands searched the empty space in front of him, then turned his head back and continued walking.

"What happened to him?" I asked when he had gone around the corner, looking up at the darkness under Fate's hood.

He released me and folded his wings so they weren't spanning the width of the path. "This is the Maze." Go figure. "The home of the Deceptive. They walked the easy road in life, blinding others to their intentions with lies and forcing them onto harder paths, misusing the bonds of trust that everyone depends on." He seemed no more distressed by this than he had by the monsters on what I supposed was the first plain of Hell. "Now they wander blinded, unable to find a way to escape the Maze."

It sounded bad, but not nearly as horrible as what we had just come from. "I would prefer this to being torn apart by monsters."

"You might think that," Fate said, taking a step back so he was behind me. A few seconds later, pale hands covered my eyes. "But imagine having no sight, no idea where you are, not even light, and wandering through these endless paths for all eternity."

I didn't have to wait an eternity to realize what he meant - I could feel the panic welling in the back of my mind already. At least monsters were a clear danger, not just a hopeless doom.

Fate removed his hands from my eyes and started walking. "There is a surprising number of people here," he said conversationally as I followed him. "The Maze seems to lure people in. Particularly politicians. I can't imagine how it happens."

Although his voice was still fairly toneless - and had a bit of a rasp to it, I noticed now - I could hear the sarcasm. It made him seem more human, somehow, though I very much doubted that he could be human. "Do they ever get out of the Maze?"

"There is no way out."

"That doesn't mean we're stuck here, right?" I didn't like the idea of wandering through a maze for the rest of my life - afterlife - with or without sight.

He shook out his wings. "Of course not. You aren't finished with Hell yet." The great black wings spread, and he held out his arms again.

Clinging to a divine being was much less awkward than I would have imagined.

"There," he said, once we were above the walls of the Maze. "Do you see that?"

"See what?" Even as I said it, I realized what he was pointing out. A wide ribbon of red split the landscape below us. "Is that…blood?"

_Everything is red, covered in far too much blood for whoever had shed it to survive. The bed is soaked with it, and I am outside myself, looking at the bloodbath._

_I am dead._

"Indeed." I wasn't entirely sure whether Fate was referring to my sudden recovery of memory and knowledge of my own death, or my question prior to that.

We were descending again, angling down past the river and towards the land on the other side. "Brace yourself. This is going to get a bit rough."

"What do you - " I started to ask, but before I could finish my question, the wings above me burst into flame, and we weren't so much flying as falling with a torn parachute.

We hit the ground rather ungracefully and rolled across the rocks, Fate's flaming wings disintegrating into ash in the tumble. I wondered how I could be dead, because that was still rather painful.

Fate stood, then reached down to help me up. It was another familiar gesture, somehow. Then he looked over his shoulder, where the wings had been. "I suppose it was too much to hope for…"

"Too much to hope for what?" I asked, but he didn't answer. He just looked out across the rocks, at what appeared to be pairs of people moving together, at arm's length. They seemed to be chained together.

"Traitors' Plain," he informed me before I could ask. "They're technically Deceptive, I suppose, but what they've done is far worse. They've deceived those closest to them, and used the knowledge to destroy their lives. They've abused the trust they were given, the love they were shown, the very ties that bound them to the people they were supposed to have cared about, and now they pay the price as they turn on themselves." As he spoke, a pair of women wandered near. They were identical, both dressed in clothing that was certainly from far before any time I knew, and I realized that they were the same person, just…cloned, I supposed. One of them turned to look at us, but the moment she did, her other self attacked her, and spun around, both of them falling into a writhing heap as they fought each other.

"They betray themselves in death," Fate said simply, "as they betrayed others in life." He studied the women on the ground. "I suppose you wouldn't recognize Delilah."

The name rang a bell. "…Delilah from the Bible?" I remembered the story, from somewhere. "But she's not - "

"She was real," he clarified. "She may not have done quite the same things, and perhaps the story was glorified beyond recognition, but she was real enough."

I began to realize that it might be prudent to reevaluate my belief in the Bible as a historical record - I couldn't remember finding it particularly trustworthy - but Fate didn't seem too concerned with that. He just took my hand again and let me back towards the river. I hadn't seen it from the air, but a rickety bridge crossed the river, stopping in the center, where it was tethered to a huge stone. A sign stood on the shore, hammered haphazardly into the ground.

HERE THERE BE MONSTERS.

"Monsters?" I asked, following Fate across the bridge to the stone in the center of the river. There was a wide, dark hole in the stone, leading downwards, but I couldn't hear or see anything suggestive of monsters.

"You'll see soon enough." He wrapped an arm around my waist, then stepped out into the emptiness, and I had no choice but to step into it with him.

_It's cold. I'm up on the roof, wearing pajamas and a winter coat, looking at the stars. "There's Orion," I say, pointing. "And Cancer, the crab, over there."_

_A warm arm wraps around my waist. "I never knew you even liked stars."_

It was the same feeling I'd gotten the first time we'd fallen; like we were almost weightless, though there was still a sensation of falling. The darkness around us, far from the dark of a cold, starlit winter night, seemed to be alive, and moving, and I almost thought I could hear it whispering.

"This is the Cavern," Fate said, voice echoing in the stillness. "Where fear punishes those who deliberately terrified others into submission."

I felt something shift behind me and twisted my head around, trying to see, but there was nothing to see but blackness. I couldn't even see Fate. At least, I couldn't see him until he held out his hand and tiny flame flickered into being in his palm.

What I saw made me wish it was dark again. Ghostly figures were whirling around in the emptiness, pale, almost transparent, their faces masks of terror, staring with wide, wide eyes.

And they were all staring at us.

I supposed it was the light. They could see now, could tell that we weren't like them, and started crowding close, seeking the light, their fear-stricken faces terrifying in the emptiness. I wanted to look away, but no matter where I looked, there were more of them, their eyes all fixed on me, and finally I twisted around and buried my face in Fate's shoulder, wrapping my arms around his waist and clinging. I felt rather cowardly, but I didn't particularly care. I just didn't want to _see_ them.

"Everyone can be scared." The voice was soft. "But it takes a lot to end up in this place. You have to work at it. Most of the souls here are extremists who went one step too far - bombers, religious fanatics, political extremists. The like."

While that was all well and good, I didn't care about who was here, or why, or what they'd done - I just wanted to be away from them. Fate's arms wrapped around me again, the feeling from some other place and time that I only half-remembered, and he said nothing as we continued falling through what I prayed was emptiness.

_I'm sitting on my bed, a thick book open on my lap. My eyes are tired. I know that I'm being watched from across the room, but I don't look up. I still have so much left to do… Even I know that I'm cracking._

_But he says nothing._

"August," he said, some time later. I lifted my head and opened my eyes. It was the first time he'd called me by name. "We're here."

I turned and looked behind me. Fate's little flame was still burning, and in the flickering light I could see what looked like a graveyard. I thought for a moment. If this was Hell, then we'd covered quite a range of things, but there was still one thing that had to be a sin that hadn't been mentioned. "Is this for murderers?"

I felt rather than saw him nod. "There are people buried here. Buried alive. People who murdered others without a just cause like self-defense are entombed here, and they die again and again in penance for their murders."

"That's horrible," I said, looking around. There were so many gravestones…

"This is our final stop. Home sweet home."

"I don't remember killing anyone." Although I barely remembered anything, beyond the fact that I was dead, and had once had a friend.

"You didn't." Fate released me and walked over to one of the tombstones, running a hand along the top of it. "But in a way, you might as well have. You can't do anything without causing ripples; when you kill yourself, you cause a tsunami, and someone will suffer, somehow."

All that blood I remembered. Had I really killed myself? I must have…

Fate leaned on the gravestone, and something about it drew me closer, and I knelt down to see whose name was engraved on it.

BEYOND BIRTHDAY

That name…that was… "No." He couldn't be a murderer. He couldn't. I reached out and touched the name, trying to find the mistake, and suddenly I knew.

_The room's too bright, the artificial light making the blood on the sheets too red, and he's crouched beside the bed, holding one lifeless hand, and staring at the body lying amidst the blood. My body. People hover in the open doorway, but he pays no attention to them._

_Sometime later, he's railing at a timid-looking blonde - Moa. "He shouldn't have died! It's this place, this stupid House, it stole his life away from him, trying to make him into something he wasn't, and I'm going to show them what they've done if it's the last thing I do!"_

_He has become a parody of the great detective we had been raised to become. Now he stands in a little girl's room, holding a stuffed animal in one hand, surveying the partially dismembered body before him and pondering how best to leave his next clue. It had to be perfect…_

_There is a lighter in his hand. The door of the hotel room is locked from the inside, and the smoke alarm is disabled. He knows that even if his fellow detective works out his plan, he will be dead before she can reach him. It's the perfect crime: no one would ever suspect a victim, and the murders will go down in history as a case that even the world's greatest detective couldn't solve. He's won._

_"I'll see you in the afterlife…"_

Fate was still leaning on the tombstone, looking down at me. I stared up at the darkness under the hood. "I don't understand…"

"When you killed yourself," he explained, sounding almost a bit irritated at having to explain it again, "you did more than kill yourself - you affected the lives of the people who cared about you. You put them on a different path, forced them into a different fate. That's what I am: the fate you left behind for the person who loved you most. The fate you have to live with the knowledge of."

I thought about that for a moment. "Then you're - "

He nodded, and pulled back his hood. I took a step back. "No…"

It was Beyond. He was older, taller, paler, but it was him. He had the same messy black hair, the same black eyes, the same expression on his face that he had always worn when he was pondering something difficult. Then I saw the scars; ragged, brutal scars, running up his neck and onto part of his face. Like he'd been burned, once, and then healed.

"You can't be here," I said, staring. "You can't be, you're a good person, you don't belong in Hell!"

"I killed people. Of course I belong here."

I shook my head. "Why would you do that? Why would you kill people, you aren't a bad person, I _know_ that!"

"You died," he said simply. "The House as good as killed you, and I couldn't let that go. I did what I had to."

"I killed _myself_!" I realized that I had tears on my face. "It wasn't anyone's fault but my own!"

He shook his head. "I could never blame you."

Maybe he couldn't blame me, but I'd realized - all of this was my fault. I hadn't thought it through, hadn't considered what could happen, and now I could see what I'd done. My best friend - my only friend - was in Hell, because he wanted to believe that I wasn't to blame for my own death.

"You're going to have to leave in a moment," Beyond informed me.

I glanced behind me. There was a beam of light, illuminating the graveyard in broad sweeps. Like it was searching for something. "What is that?" I asked shakily.

"It's going to bring you up. You're going to Heaven, after all." He wasn't bitter. At all. He sounded almost…happy.

"But - " I had killed him. I belonged here, in Hell, not in Heaven.

The light was getting closer. Beyond was just sitting on his tombstone, watching it approach with no distress at all. It was like he didn't even _want_ to escape his fate.

"But I don't want - " The light was almost on me, and I leaped forward, nearly knocking Beyond off the stone as I wrapped my arms around him. Perhaps, if that was the way to Heaven, I could drag him up with me. I would just have to hold on tight enough…

Then there was light, all around me. "Goodbye, August," he said quietly.

And then he was gone.


End file.
